Following the expectations of the industry observers, Mail.ru, the parent company of VKontakte and two other largest social networks in Russia, has finally signed a music licensing deal with the recording studio to tackle piracy on the networks. Thus, the copyright legal action between the companies has been successfully settled.

Russia’s social networking giant VKontakte, referred to by the Russians as the most convenient social network ever, has long been branded one of the worst online piracy facilitators. Apparently, now it is taking steps to fix its reputation. As previously predicated, Mail.ru has signed a licensing agreement with the copyright owners which will allow music and video content be hosted legally on VKontakte.

Aside from VKontakte (which means InTouch or InContact in Russian), the deal also covers two other social networking platforms: Odnoklassniki (which means Classmates in Russian) and Moi Mir (My World). They all belong to Mail.ru, the major email service provider in the country, and altogether form top 3 most popular social networking sites in Russia.

As a result, Mail.ru now has licensing agreements with the 3 leading music rights groups – Universal, Warner and Sony. As for Universal, it will allow huge catalogs of music to appear on vKontakte and put to rest the legal action against VKontakte. One by one, the Russian social networks have settled their differences with the music giants. The details are unknown, but Mail.ru said that the websites would test various monetization models to find the best solution for both artists and their fans.

According to the rumors, Universal Music has received a guarantee that it will generate at least $8m over the next 3 years. VKontakte welcomed the deal and expressed optimism for the future, while Universal Music Group said that the deal would ensure that artists are paid when their works are exploited on social networks.

Although it is yet unknown how the deal will affect the way music is made available on the social networks, the industry watchers admit it’s likely it will be less available than it currently is. It is not a secret that music downloaded from VKontakte is an important element of the pirate content landscape, so that part of it is going to change soon.